Poetry and the Power of Place

97 Poetry and the Power of Place Alison Hawthorne Deming As a poet I worship places, like the crook in the mountains where the Santa Catalinas meet Agua Caliente Hill outside the northeast corner of Tucson. There is a swale between the two geologic forms—the mountains running west to east, and the hill running south to north—so that where they meet forms a shelter and screens from view whatever lies in the distance. That meeting place looks like a gentle valley, but approaching it, entering it on foot, reveals a canyon where cliffs tower over a few bottomless pools of black water contained in the vessel of rock that running water has carved out for itself. I live in that corner of the Sonoran Desert. Driving home on nights when the moon is full, I see the lunar high-beam burst out of the night sky, and it seems the place I live in is heading for me, instead of the other way round, and I open my heart to its beauty as a mystic opens her heart to the cosmos or the religious open theirs to God. I worship places where the earth lets its knobby backbone show, where its thin and living skin is made to shine from moonlight, where the night-wandering coyotes and bobcats turn their heads to look dismissively over their shoulders at me as they pass on their evening errands. I worship human-made places too, like the house where my relatives gather for holidays, weddings, and funerals—the farmhouse on Wayside Lane in West Redding, Connecticut, with its oak meadow and snapping turtle pond, with its fireplace so big a child could walk inside it and perhaps enter another story lying beyond its sooty back wall. In the dining room a circular wrought-iron candle sconce hangs over the long rustic table, and the walls are papered with a mural of African animals grazing on pale savannah, gazelle, lion, zebra, and giraffe lazily feeding beside us, where my relations have gathered together to share food and stories for a hundred years. I worship that gathering place, that belonging in stories occasioned by the place. How Aunt Gwen and Aunt Hildegarde, great-aunts on my father’s side, once argued—oh, 98 Ecotone: reimagining place how they all loved to argue—about who could walk the farthest until the two sisters burst from the table to prove the point, walking all day through woods and down village lanes, until Gwen won by hiking all the way to Massachusetts. And how Imogen, their sister and my grandmother , once pleaded with Hal, then a boy, to let go of the heron he had caught on his fishing lure and kept locked in the barn, and how she had civilized him on that day into caring as she cared for the freedom of wild things. I worship this place in which my ancestors are turned into myth and from which all our journeys have set forth. It is the place that has bound us as a family in belonging. I worship cities too, like Manhattan, which I visit to see paintings in the museums; the Aztec jaguar crouched inside a boulder at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that mystify and arouse me; the Chrysler Building that is not a building but a work of art making the whole city a museum; the Christmas lights on Park Avenue and the winter blur of exhaust rising from yellow cabs; the small uptown committees of dogs, some wearing plaid or fleece jackets, being taken to Central Park by professional dog walkers; and the throngs of people moving with purpose and direction day and night, the fragments of their conversations a concatenation of longing and complaint and business that drives the planet on its joy ride through space. I was sixteen when the city first called me up to tell me that people are the authors of their own lives, more complete and true to themselves than to families or places or states. This city has shaped me without my belonging in or to it, because it lives in my mind like a god—the hustle, the glory, the...